Shakespeare Casting Call

From Director Julia Thudium:

The World of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

    The main themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are love and magic. Love: Shakespeare portrays romantic love as a blind, irrational, often beautiful force that can be both cruel and forgiving. Ultimately, love drives the play’s entire plot.

Magic is a huge component. The fairies’ magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play, is another element central to the fantastic atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. Although the misuse of magic causes chaos, as when Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to Lysander’s eyelids, magic ultimately resolves the play’s tensions by restoring love to balance among the quartet of Athenian youths. Additionally, the ease with which Puck uses magic to his own ends, as when he reshapes Bottom’s head into that of an ass, stands in contrast to the laboriousness and gracelessness of the craftsmen’s attempt to stage their play.

Our version of this delightful play will be filled with music and laughter.

From Director Paul Ford

The World of Comedy of Errors
 

One of the first trade guilds in our Western culture was the “Artists of Dionysus” — actors, acrobats, dancers, jugglers and clowns.  And to them we dedicate our production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.  

Shakespeare “borrowed” his story of mistaken identities and missed meetings from William Warner who translated the play directly from the Roman playwright, Plautus.  Plautus’ work, The Twin Menaechmi, was written around 200 BCE and became at once a major influence for all future comedy for its use of stock characters, comedic insane situations and the foibles of the common man.  Combining this style of comic writing with the style of comic performance such as Commedia dell’arte, produced a very distinct and popular form of clowning and story-telling that lasted throughout the middle ages and into the Italian and English Renaissance.  

More than any thing else, we will work to find and milk every bit of comedy and good cheer from this early Shakespeare play.

As You Like It, 2022

Directed by

Julia Thudium